Boys are adrenaline junkies and seem to go at 100mph... they’re literally unstoppable
Joined at birth tearaway twins live life to the full
TEARAWAY 11-year-olds Hussein and Hassan Benhaffaf are known fondly by their mother as Happiness Ambassadors.
It was while still in the womb that doctors first discovered the twin boys were conjoined from chest to pelvis.
When they were four months old, a team of surgeons spent 14 hours intricately separating the babies in Great Ormond Street Hospital in London before they were flown home by the Irish Air Corps.
Now a heart-warming RTE documentary – My Story: Hassan And Hussein Born Connected – is set to give an insight into the giddy, high octane world of the twins, who are aiming to become Irish Paralympians.
Zooming around on their wiggle cars, flipping into handstands and climbing frames, they give a
I don’t know what the future holds but my simple wish is their happiness ANGIE BENHAFFAF ON HER INSPIRATIONAL BOYS
snapshot into their lives in footage filmed by the boys themselves, their mother Angie and their sisters Malika and Iman on a camcorder loaned to them by RTE.
“I feel their little personalities were really captured”, said their mother this week from her Cork home she shares with her four children and husband Azzedine.
“It was beautiful. They are adrenaline junkies, and they love their sports.
“They love to surprise people, just because they are in a wheelchair doesn’t mean they are not doing all the same activities as other 11-year-olds their age.
“They’re literally unstoppable. They have great little friends and a fabulous class, they are in the prosthetic legs all the time in school and when they are out to play where we live they are out in their little cars.
“Sometimes it can be quite surreal when you remember where they started off and there was no hope.” At birth, Hassan and Hussein shared many organs and had only one leg each, but crucially each boy had a separate heart. At the start of the film, they tell the camera: “We’re twins, we’re 10 years old and we’re double trouble!”
Hussein loves playing basketball and being at the beach while Hassan loves “messing with my friends and doing athletics” – and they both love making videos on Tik Tok and Youtube.
Despite having more than 50 painful surgeries since the first mammoth operation in 2009, their robust approach to life is clear in the kaleidoscope of camera shots of the Cork boys in the documentary.
Angie said: “They shared everything except the heart, they were left with half chest, half the pelvis, half the gut, half the liver, half the gut, half the bladder, half the bowel, congenital scoliosis which is also a life-threatening condition.
“We’ve to go Great Ormond Street in the summer for more procedures and Hassan has a major surgery before then in Crumlin on his spine.
“It never ends really and that’s the sad thing.
“I don’t know what the future holds but anything they’ve ever set their mind to, they’ve achieved it. A friend of mine years ago called them the Happiness Ambassadors and it’s a name that stuck in my head for them.”
She added she has a simple wish for her boys. Angie said: “Happiness, happiness would be the number one thing for them.” ■ My Story: Hassan And Hussein Born Connected Publicity airs tomorrow on RTE Two at 12.50pm and on RTE Player.